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In this opening chapter, I try to find answers to two questions: When did my physical or emotional illnesses start? Was I ever physically or emotionally well?

I also examine the criteria for judging my physical or emotional wellness. What reports of my conditions accurately reflected my physical or emotional reality?

Was I well at age 12?

I reached age 12 on July 5, 1966. Later that month, I sat on a metal chair outside the wooden door to the utility room. I watched the sunset through the clotheslines as the washing machine churned.

I held a kitchen knife to my belly, ready to carve out my guts. Why should I go on living?

What bothered me so much emotionally that I was ready to end my life?

My family would soon move out of the house where I was born. The story I remember was that we were moving so I could go to seventh grade at a good public school.

I didn’t like the house that much. My three siblings and I slept in one room. I slept in the top of a bunk bed and my younger brother slept in the bottom. The children weren’t allowed to enter two of the house’s five rooms, my parents’ bedroom and the guest bedroom.

My parents’ house was an ungraceful old, not like my grandparents’ house a few miles away with its high ceilings and front porch. There was no air conditioning for the Miami heat, just jalousies that the children weren’t allowed to open or close, and portable fans that the children weren’t allowed to turn on or off.

I didn’t like the neighborhood that much. It’s on the flight path to Miami International Airport’s runways, with passenger and freight planes flying overhead, sometimes every other minute. Events like this were in the neighborhood’s near future.

I spent as much time as I could outside in the neighborhood. My alternative was to stay in my parents’ house, and obey my mother’s dozens of rules of conduct. Stay out of the bedrooms, except for the kids’ bedroom. Don’t turn on the television; you can only watch it 2 hours a week, and only the programs the parents select. Don’t turn on the radio. Don’t play any records. Stay out of the refrigerator; stay out of the freezer; stay out of the cabinets. You can eat and drink only when everyone else eats and drinks; you can eat and drink only what everyone else eats and drinks; you can eat and drink only the amount you are given; you must eat and drink everything you are given; you must come to the table in socially acceptable clothing; you can eat and drink only after saying a prayer; you must offer a prayer if prompted; you must participate with socially acceptable behavior during the prayer; you must stay at the table until you are allowed to leave. Don’t run. Don’t yell.

Don’t. Stay out. I got the message.

There weren’t many close friends whom I couldn’t bear to leave. I played baseball, swam, fished, and hung out with other kids.

I walked or rode a bike almost every day to and from my elementary school two miles away. I almost wrote “my” bike, but any toy or item I thought I “possessed” could be taken away from me at any moment at the whim of any authority figure. Was anything really mine?

I stopped on the way home from school anywhere I could, and did anything I could to delay going home. I went to everyone else’s house, and none of my friends ever came to my parents’ house.

All that time, though, I was sure that the kids I knew from the neighborhood and school weren’t in the group with whom I wanted to develop deep friendships. I felt that they weren’t really my friends or my peers. The people in my peer group seemed to exist somewhere else.

My feeling probably made me come across to other kids as detached and aloof. But I don’t know the origins of that feeling. It didn’t make sense then: I didn’t have friends elsewhere.

If I moved away from the kids I grew up with, that didn’t bother me too much. Maybe the group I really belonged to was in the new place. Moving away from the neighborhood and the house didn’t bother me too much, either.

What bothered me so much emotionally that I was ready to end my life?

Was it puberty? Was something physically wrong with me, some undiagnosed disease? Was I chemically imbalanced; didn’t get adequate nutrition; or stayed out in the sun too long?

What I remember feeling was wrong with me, so much that I held a knife ready to gut myself, at age 12, was life with my parents.

I would leave an unattractive place for a nicer place, yes. But my parents were going there, too.

The wet blanket on my existence would stay wrapped around me. There’d be no relief.

Misery, just like it always was, with more misery to come.

No love, just rules. No rewards for good behavior, because that was expected of me. I looked ahead only to punishment for breaking rules.

What was expected of me at age 12? I was expected to stand by and endure anything, everything. No escape was possible; my only response was to endure it.

So I didn’t use the knife on myself that day.

I didn’t speak with anyone about that day in 1966 until almost 42 years later. It didn’t make that day and the rest of what bothered me so much at age 12 go away to not think or talk about it. Emotional illnesses just stayed with me all that time.

I left my parents’ house in 1972. I didn’t start getting emotionally well until I started feeling therapy 3 ½ years ago.

Why didn’t I get emotionally well by moving away from a situation that made me ill? I tried, but nothing worked, as I describe in this eBook.

I just needed to get away from my parents. But moving to a dozen and a half places, and living with the different sets of people at those places over the next five years, didn’t provide any emotional cures for me. Neither did moving to even more places after 1977.

Was I well at age 9?

Here’s one of the few pictures of my childhood. It’s a black and white picture developed in May 1964 of us four children lined up against the neighbor’s fence of my parents’ house’s front yard.

We wore good clothes, so the photo was probably taken a month earlier at Easter time. It makes me laugh to see 9-year-old, blond-haired me wearing an ill-fitting white shirt and tie, as I haven’t worn a white shirt and tie more than a handful of times during the past nine years.

On a closer look, at age 9 there were black rings under my eyes. My abdomen is also distended.

I was diagnosed in 2010 with spondylolisthesis between the L5 spinal vertebra and the S1 bone of the sacrum. My sacrum was slipping backwards, tilting downwards, and losing its position relative to the rest of my spine.

When I asked the doctor what I did to get this condition, she said it usually starts in childhood due to a sudden injury. At age 55, I found out that I suffered for maybe 45 to 50 years from a childhood injury, and I didn’t know anything about it.

She could’ve knocked me over with a feather! But her diagnosis started to make a little more sense as I remembered various lower back problems over the years.

One memory came to me recently while lying in bed before sleeping. It’s a scene of me exercising, performing straight leg raises and sit-ups with classmates in a field near my elementary school’s basketball court around fourth or fifth grade, probably age 8 or 9.

It’s a body memory of how I needed to adjust my lower back position and do the exercises at an angle to avoid a strange clicking sound. The person holding my ankles while I did sit-ups couldn’t hear anything, but I remember feeling the internal clicks back then.

I feel the slippage of my S1 bone to the wrong position with respect to the L5 vertebra now when I do physical therapy exercises such as “bicycles” while lying on my back. For the associated symptoms, I stretch my hamstrings and do other stretches throughout the day to keep the muscle tightness, pain, and stiffness in check.

I don’t get too emotionally bothered when minor back and butt and leg pains arise now. The pains used to “get on my nerves” because they came out of some mysterious and unexplained place.

Why did it initially seem so strange for me to think that childhood injuries didn’t somehow resolve themselves on their own? If I get physically injured today, I know it takes treatment and healing over time in order to get well.

What happens if I choose to not get the treatment I need for childhood physical or emotional injuries? If, instead of receiving treatment for the root causes, I try to “suck it up” or “move on” or “get over it”, am I really physically or emotionally well at any time after the injuries?

What happens when I don’t get the treatment I need because I don’t even realize that I’m physically or emotionally injured?

I just lessen the physical and emotional symptoms of spondylolisthesis with stretches and exercises. My doctor informs me that there’s no chance of a cure, and that the next level of treatment is to fuse the L5 vertebra and the S1 bone.

After I wrote this section, I had surgery for the forgotten back injury that may have been there at age 9. At age 56 I still show the black rings under my eyes that were there at age 9. I wasn’t well then, so I’ll look further back.

Was I well at age 6?

I have an 8 x 10 picture of me with two-dozen other kids in a children’s choir. The picture isn’t dated, but it matches my appearance in my first grade photograph at age 6.

The first things I noticed from both photographs are the black rings under my eyes, almost raccoon-like. I can’t really tell how the rest of my body appeared.

What is it with the black rings? Here’s a list of possible causes:

– Allergies;

– Eczema;

– Heredity;

– Lifestyle factors, such as physical or emotional stress, smoking, or chronic alcohol use;

– Nasal congestion;

– Pigmentation irregularities;

– Rubbing or scratching your eyes;

– Sun exposure, which prompts your body to produce more melanin, the pigment that gives skin its color;

– Thinning skin and loss of fat and collagen.

I suffer from allergies now, living in the DC area, just like everyone else who lives here. But I wasn’t bothered by allergies until I was in my mid-twenties, living in Charleston, South Carolina, during spring. That was the first time I needed to take allergy medicine to get through the day. Then I took a different allergy medicine to sleep at night.

I never suffered from eczema. I came down with chicken pox as an adult, though, at age 35. My relatives and Navy bosses and coworkers were really concerned. I was touched that they all gathered in my bedroom to see my naked body covered in pustules. :-\

Maybe heredity was a factor. I remember black rings under my parents’ eyes from time to time. But there weren’t black rings under either of my parents’ eyes all the time like there were and are under my eyes.

Smoking or chronic alcohol use: At age 6? No, and not ever.

Lifestyle factors, such as physical or emotional stress: at ages 6, 9, 12, and 56? It seems entirely plausible. But why don’t I remember the details of the stress?

Nasal congestion: not as a constant symptom.

Pigmentation irregularities: nope.

Rubbing or scratching my eyes: Maybe, but not all day everyday. How often does a person need to rub or scratch their eyes to produce the symptom of black rings?

Sun exposure: yes, at ages 6, 9, and 12. Later in life, though, I was on submarines that stayed underwater for weeks and months at a time, and there were still black rings under my eyes. Did the same symptom appear from different causes? Maybe.

Thinning skin: maybe at age 56, but not at ages 6, 9, and 12.

What physical or emotional stress did six-year-old me experience that produced this symptom all the time? It probably was a constant stress in order to produce a constant symptom.

Was an internal stress or an external stress the cause?

I lived in a lot of different places and situations. The external stress conditions varied from life-threatening spikes of hitchhiking experiences and the constant close quarters claustrophobic submarine life to relaxing inside an air-conditioned house in a nice, quiet neighborhood.

It probably takes some constant level of an internal physical or emotional stress in order to produce a constant symptom in me, given that the symptom appeared in so many varying external conditions over such a long time.

How was I under a constant internal physical or emotional stress, but not consciously feeling stressed?

I honestly answered a questionnaire two weeks ago for reasons not related to stress. I received it back in the mail today and noticed that, unbeknownst to me, my answers formed a matrix of clinical indicators that show whether or not to test for high levels of cortisol, the main stress hormone.

My honest answers two weeks ago were negative for all the clinical indicators of high levels of cortisol: no difficulty sleeping, no increased forgetfulness, no decreased mental sharpness, not depressed, not nervous, not anxious, no decreased muscle size, no weight gain around the waist, no elevated triglycerides, no sugar craving, no cold body temperature, no decreased erections, no decreased libido, no hot flashes, no night sweats, no bone loss, no stress, no rapid aging, no thinning skin, no high blood pressure.

What kind of constant internal physical or emotional stress could last this long into my life, from at least age 6 to age 56, yet the main stress hormone, cortisol, wasn’t present?

I have clues, but no answers at this point. I address this again for possible causes in the next chapter, “What’s the Problem,” and for treatments in the last chapter, “How I’m Getting Well.”

I still show the black rings under my eyes that were there at age 6. I wasn’t physically or emotionally well then, so I’ll look further back.

Was I well at age 3? Or as an infant?

There was a startling article in 2002 by the London Times headlined We’re stuck with our personality at age of three. It related the findings of a study made on over 1,000 children at age 3 and again at age 26 that concluded that a child’s personality is largely determined by age 3. At age 26, the people in the study each maintained the same personality he or she exhibited with his or her behavioral style at age 3. Page 7 of the study lists the personality factors measured.

My parents are responsible for all my genetic material. My mother raised me at home, so my parents also determined almost all the environmental factors that influenced who I was at age 3.

If this study is correct, the person I was at age 3 is basically the same as who I became at any later age! Alright, let’s go with the science for the general theme.

The problem with me using scientifically valid evidence, though, is that I don’t possess much in the way of personal factual evidence for the person I was at age three. I didn’t obtain any doctor’s records from my 1954 birth through 1972 when I left my parents’ house. When I contacted the hospital in Miami where I was born, I found out that they didn’t archive my data.

I requested factual birth and infancy and early childhood information from my surviving parent, my mother. I asked: “Please package up and send to me my birth records, infant and childhood photos, toys, favorite things, and mementos through age 18.

Also, please write for me and send with the package a narrative of what went on from my gestation through age 6 months. Include for the pre-birth period what you felt, were doing ordinarily, and what happened out of the ordinary.

Include for my birth how long the gestational period was; how long, and what happened during labor; the presence and type of any anesthesia; details of the forceps delivery; my physical characteristics immediately at birth, such as whether or not I was anoxic; how I was handled immediately such as how soon the umbilical cord was cut; how long and for what purpose I was separated from you including incubation periods; and other hospital events such as circumcision.

Include for infancy how I was ordinarily cared for and by whom; any extraordinary events or accidents; doctor visits and their purpose; any periods where I had a need that wasn’t met, such as isolation, or caring for my older sister; or other activity.

Please do not give me the idealized version. Please tell me the truth. Thanks.”

I received what I specifically asked my mother to not send; the fairy tale versions of my personal history. “Paul was a wonderful baby.” “The family lived a quiet, contented life.”

There were no hospital records or specific descriptions of what procedures took place. Instead, “All of the above was standard practice.” She did say that she was completely anesthetized during my birth, and woke up some time afterwards. There were no descriptions of doctor visits, although I know there was at least one unusual visit at an early age, due to my left leg not developing as quickly as my right leg.

There was a gap in documenting my life between age 1 ½, when my younger sister was born, and age 6. There were clues, though, that my mother hurried back to what she really wanted to do with her life, be the star of the show every Sunday as a church organist. Who cared for my 6-month old younger sister, me at 2, and my older sister at 3 ½ years old after my mother’s return to work wasn’t mentioned.

I also received photocopies of pictures where I was in the picture. I wasn’t entitled to receive reprints or the originals.

So I don’t possess what’s usually considered verifiable information. I really only have what I feel to guide me.

I invited my mother to share with me what for other women are some of the richest, fullest experiences of their lives. I felt certain when I asked my mother for my information that I’d receive the bare minimum, reflecting what an inconvenience I was for her. I cried when I made the request; after I sent the request; when I was anticipating receipt; many times. I still needed something that only my mother could give to me.

Here’s a set of feelings that I experienced twice earlier this year, 2011.

They were strong, jolting me out of my sleep with an all-consuming need to be picked up and held and caressed and soothed and loved by a woman.

And I do mean strong. It felt like a red-hot fuse was lit, and it would never burn out.

Pretty soon, I also felt hopeless, because the woman I needed didn’t come, although I needed her for so long and I needed her so much. My need for her wouldn’t quiet until she came to me and picked me up!

She was someone I needed desperately, and she knew my need because I called out, cried her name again and again. With outstretched arms and tears flowing, I loudly cried for her again and again; she must have heard me!

After a while I stopped. There are just so many times I could cry out to her and try to get her to come pick me up.

But my need for her didn’t go away.

I couldn’t go to her. I was helpless, confined to the bed.

She didn’t come to me. I’m not important.

Nobody came to pick me up. Nobody cared.

And I still needed her.

She was nearby. I needed to wait or do something extra so that I deserved her.

Maybe if I didn’t need her so much, she’d come over and stroke my head and look at me with love.

I was alone.

Both times, I just lie alone in bed and felt my need for her. What else was there for me to do?

Should I dress, and run out to get some woman to physically substitute for the woman whom I needed to hold and caress and love me? That doesn’t work.

How about I recreate the situation, get a woman who won’t be there for me, physically or emotionally, and then try, time after time, and never stop trying, to get her to love me? That really doesn’t work.

How about I repress all these feelings in an effort to make them not bother me? I wouldn’t write this eBook if that worked. We all understand deep down that repressing our feelings can’t work over the long run.

Nothing I do now can satisfy my need for mother. It’s too late now; I’m an adult. All I can do is feel the need for her.

My need for mother always stayed around because I didn’t get what I needed from her during infancy and early childhood. I tried all of the above and more, but my unsatisfied need didn’t accept substitutes later in life.

I need mother;

getting her love is hopeless;

I’m helpless to do anything about it;

I’m not important;

nobody cares about me;

I don’t deserve love;

I deserve to be alone.

This is just one set of feelings I experienced this year, 2011.

To start answers for two of the questions at the beginning of the chapter:

Q. When did my physical and emotional illnesses start?

A. When I didn’t get what every child needs, their parents’ love. It started early in my life, during infancy or early childhood; the proof is what I feel at age 56. My need for mother wouldn’t still jolt me out of my sleep, and influence my past and current relationships, if she was there for me at that critical time.

Q. When was I ever physically or emotionally well?

A. I felt this strong need for mother as a child standing up in a crib. I guess I was alright before then, before age 1 ½ or so, which was when my younger sister was born.

But there’s no proof either way because I haven’t felt it yet. Or maybe I don’t understand the origins of what I re-experienced during therapy sessions.

I can’t give any answers to the question of when or if I was ever physically or emotionally well. I just know and feel that my emotional illnesses started early, and continued on for a long time.

What’s the Problem?

In this chapter, I describe my physical and emotional illnesses that I don’t already mention in the first chapter, “My Illnesses Started Early.” I use a question and answer format to describe post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, and my other diagnosed illnesses. I continue the Q&A format with an “Undiagnosed illnesses” subject.

I follow with the “Repression” subject, and describe how repression has been a severe problem for me.

Diagnosed illnesses

I credit Dr. Arthur Janov specifically in this subject and in the subjects that follow. These are excerpts or paraphrases that I make from his book, Primal Healing: Access the Incredible Power of Feelings to Improve Your Health.

What’s my emotional illness diagnosis?

I suffer from PTSD, post-traumatic stress disorder; code 309.81, chronic with delayed onset. I revisit the diagnosis several times a month when I pay my therapist’s invoices.

Let me start out with a section of what PTSD and its symptoms are not, at least for me. I say elsewhere in this eBook, Getting Well for the First Time, what its symptoms are for me.

I didn’t contract PTSD as a result of military service, which is the most common public perception of the onset of PTSD. My PTSD started long before I joined the Navy at age 23. I experienced overwhelming flashbacks at ages 22, 21, 20, 19, 18, 17, 16. Joining the Navy made my PTSD worse; and, because the military became an all-volunteer force almost 40 years ago, I’m the one who made it worse.

I experienced overwhelming flashbacks that lasted minutes, hours, and days. I haven’t experienced flashbacks of more than mild severity in the course of day-to-day life for a while, though.

I re-experience traumatic events during therapy sessions, but not to an overwhelming extent, and I try to feel them in their context. If I flashback while at work, I close the door and lie down, and again try to feel them in their context. I describe this process further in the last chapter, “How I’m Getting Well.”

I’m not a dangerous or violent person. Even a recent event, where a senior citizen almost ran me over in broad daylight as I walked across the street inside the clearly marked crosswalks, didn’t provoke me into doing what I felt the impulse to do.

I didn’t contract PTSD as a result of drug or alcohol use. I didn’t suffer from psychosis or schizophrenia or some other debilitating illness where PTSD is one of the side effects. I’m not prescribed any drugs specifically for PTSD symptoms.

In fact, I didn’t get PTSD as a result of traumatic events that I remember with any detail so far. The evidence of the traumatic events is the symptoms. I explore these two observations further in the “Keep doing what I was already doing” subject of the “Exits to Avoid Along the Highway” chapter.

PTSD came for me as the result of the external world affecting my internal world at an early age. My therapist says my symptoms indicate that the Traumatic events most likely occurred during infancy and early childhood.

The resultant Stress likely started after birth up through age 2. So I probably was physically and emotionally ill (the Disorder part) ever since about age 3 (the Post part). What happened to me since about age 3 only deepened and spread the damage of my PTSD.

Why do I refer to my illness diagnosis of PTSD as a physical and emotional illness?

Read this except, Why do emotions hurt?, which is restated here as follows:

“..both physical pain and emotional pain use the same pathways in the brain. In brief, pain is pain no matter what the source; emotional pain is physical. It is not just in our minds, it not just psychological, and cannot be treated on the psychological level alone.”

That’s about what I understand. I take pain medicine almost every day because it calms both my physical pain and my emotional pain.

What do I feel about my illness diagnosis of PTSD?

The PTSD diagnosis to me is just a label for others’ convenience. I don’t feel that I need to adopt an attitude or act in some way to stay consistent with what attitudes or actions people usually assign to the label.

So I’m sorry if the way I describe PTSD doesn’t make a sensational story. I’m sorry if my descriptions of PTSD and its symptoms don’t meet any expectations regarding the label’s attributes.

But I don’t write fiction or news stories. I just describe my reality as best I can in this eBook.

The way the PTSD label affects me internally is similar to what Dr. Arthur Janov notes about the terms “esteem” and “important” here:

“I have never heard a patient cry about ‘esteem.’ That is someone else’s idea about us, not a proper feeling. It is strange: we can feel unimportant (unloved) but not important. If we were important to our parents, we will feel solid, good, and capable, but not important, because that is not a feeling: it is someone else’s idea of who and what we are.”

I don’t feel obligated to act to match the PTSD label. I may act in accordance with someone else’s idea about me in another context, such as displaying good table manners at a restaurant during dinner, but not concerning this illness.

For example, I stayed home for the July 4^th fireworks this year, but not to avoid setting off a PTSD reaction. I preferred to watch a replay of the fireworks on the Mall on television because I didn’t make other convenient arrangements.

For similar labeling reasons, I write “physical and emotional illness” rather than “mental illness”, and “therapy” rather than “psychotherapy”, throughout this eBook. The common public perceptions of the “psychotherapy” and “mental illness” labels are over 100 years out of date.

I compare this perception with how people perceive magnetic resonance imaging, MRI. MRI machines were in a rudimentary form 100 years ago. The public perception of MRI today as a diagnostic tool, though, doesn’t suffer from any labeling of its early development.

I did a Google search of the terms “fMRI” (functional magnetic resonance imaging) and “babies.” The results of this search and similar searches show now that we’re in 2011, neuroscientists know exactly how the human brain develops. There are many valid fMRI studies by neuroscientists of what both babies and adults feel and think.

Then I compare the information in the “fMRI babies” Google search with the results of a Google search of the term “phrenology.” Early attempts to map human feelings and thinking to specific brain areas are laughable now that it’s 2011.

The common public perceptions of “psychotherapy” and “mental illness” are on the same level that “phrenology” is to understanding brain function. That Freudian analysis is even considered in any way valid now that it’s 2011, for example, is both laughable and pitiful because it and its derivative analysis techniques are still so widely used.

If someone is trying to get well once and for all from physical and emotional illnesses today using Freudian and derivative analysis techniques, it isn’t going to work. These techniques can’t provide a cure for the common public perception of “mental illness” because they don’t have a valid understanding or approach toward dealing with the underlying problems. These techniques and others that operate under the common public perception of “psychotherapy” treat only symptoms.

I know. My then-wife received such treatment and medication for almost 40 years. She wasn’t well, and she will never get well. She is unable to face reality about her physical and emotional states. She is thus unable to address her generating causes. Her treatment will only get her symptoms reduced if she takes her pills every day.

My writing and speaking aren’t good enough to keep readers’ focus away from labels, labels that prevent people from understanding what I write and speak. I also try not to internally use the mental shortcuts offered by slapping a label on something to keep from understanding it. So I don’t use such labels in my writing and speaking, either.

What am I doing about my spondylolisthesis?

I describe spondylolisthesis in the first chapter, “My Illnesses Started Early” under the “Was I well at age 9?” subject. I want to emphasize here how unbelievable it still seems to me that I was physically ill for 45-50 years before I received a diagnosis.

The more I feel my disbelief, the closer I come to feeling the reality of how I developed physical and emotional illnesses that started as early or earlier than did the spondylolisthesis. Most of my feelings surrounding the contexts of my early illnesses are too painful for me, though, because there’s still a big disconnect between what I feel and what I think regarding the subject.

I lay still 30 minutes for a lumbar MRI last month that produced some interesting images. I know that it’s not a good thing to hear my doctor say my spondylolisthesis is “impressive.” Here’s what she was speaking of:

When I look at the bottom of the picture, I see how far S1 dislocates away from L5 just along the axis of this one view. Other MRI images show how the S1 bone slides backwards and tilts downwards to pinch the spinal nerves in that area.

It’s no wonder that that part of my back hurt all the time. But it didn’t hurt as much after I better understood what’s going on with it. There’s no longer the added emotional pain of not knowing exactly the source of my physical pain.

There’s also relief from emotional pain when I took steps to address the physical problem. I no longer waited for some undefined future event to make me act. I waited long enough to take care of my spondylolisthesis, until it became rated as a grade 3 severity on a scale of 1 to 3.

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